But our spending on food — proportional to our income — has actually declined dramatically since 1960, according a chart recently published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As the chart shows, the average share of per capitaincome spent on food declined from 17.5 percent in 1960 to 9.6 percent in 2007. (It has since risen slightly, reaching 9.9 percent in 2013.)

Because of the overall rise in income, and the consistent shrinking of food prices adjusted for inflation, we actually have more disposable income than our grandparents did, according to Annette Clauson, an agricultural economist with USDA’s Economic Research Service who helped calculate the data in the chart.

“We are purchasing more food for less money, and we are purchasing our food for less of our income,” Clauson tells The Salt. “This is a good thing, because we have income to purchase other things.” (We know, it may not always feel that way these days.)

Households spend more money on food when incomes rise, but that expenditure represents a smaller portion of income. Image: USDA Economic Research Service

Of course, the more money you make, the more total dollars you’ll have available to spend on food. But that expenditure will be a smaller share of your total income, as this second chart shows. Likewise, the less you make, the bigger your food spending will be relative to your income — and the more costly food may seem.

In 2013, the lowest income bracket spent on average $3,655 annually on food, or 36 percent of total income. People in the highest income bracket, meanwhile, spent about $11,000 annually on food, which was only about 8 percent of their earnings.

What’s more, says Clauson, when it comes to consumer purchases, Americans spend the least on food consumed at home compared with just about every other country in the world.

To be clear, this is not relative to income. It’s a slightly different calculation the USDA does when it compares food spending in the U.S. with other countries.

About 40 percent of household consumer expenditures in Guatemala and the Philippines went to food in 2013, compared with just 6.7 percent in the U.S. Even the French and the Japanese spend about double of what we spend on food — 14 percent of all consumer expenditures each. (You can check out that data, and the data for 85 other countries, here.)

“Food is a still a good bargain for the American consumer,” says Clauson.

That may be true in general terms, and as NPR’s Marilyn Geewax reported in February, soybeans, sugar and wheat are all cheaper than they were a few years ago.

But as we’ve reported, there’s been volatility in the price of plenty of other food items. And key staples like beef and eggs are actually more expensive these days than they have been.

]]>http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2015/03/02/your-grandparents-spent-more-of-their-money-on-food-than-you-do/feed/0usda-incomePer capita disposable income spent on food in the U.S., 1960-2013. Image: USDA Economic Research Servicefood-pricesHouseholds spend more money on food when incomes rise, but that expenditure represents a smaller portion of income. Image: USDA Economic Research ServiceWhen Food Is Too Good To Waste, College Kids Pick Up The Scrapshttp://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2015/02/27/when-food-is-too-good-to-waste-college-kids-pick-up-the-scraps/
http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2015/02/27/when-food-is-too-good-to-waste-college-kids-pick-up-the-scraps/#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 23:35:36 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/?p=93583

Student volunteers with The Campus Kitchens Project evaluate produce. The initiative gets high-school and college students to scavenge food from cafeterias, grocery stores and farmers’ markets, cook it and deliver it to organizations serving low-income people in their communities. Photo: Courtesy of DC Central Kitchen

Back in 2011 when I was a student at the University of Maryland in College Park I once noticed a massive pile of trash in front of a dining hall. A closer look revealed that it was mostly food — a half-eaten sandwich, a browning apple and what appeared to be the remains of the day’s lunch special.

The heap was gross, but intriguing. Turned out it was a stunt to get students thinking about how much food they throw out each day.

Nowadays, students are coming face to face with their food waste, and its environmental and social impact, a lot more often. They also have more opportunities do something about it.

The conspirator behind the stinky installation at UMD was Ben Simon, 25. Simon founded the Food Recovery Network as an undergraduate as a way to get college kids to salvage uneaten food from cafeterias and deliver it to local agencies that feed the needy. He’s been so successful with the initiative that he was recently highlighted on Forbes’ “30 Under 30″ list of entrepreneurs.

The average college student generates 142 pounds of food waste a year, according to Recycling Works, a program in Massachusetts. And college campuses as a group throw out a total of 22 million pounds of uneaten food each year, the Food Recovery Network has found. It’s a small – but significant — piece of the 35 million tons of food discarded by Americans in 2012 alone, according to the latest estimate from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. About 40 percent of all food in the U.S. never even makes it to the plate before it’s tossed. Yet 1 in 6 Americans go hungry.

Like many institutions with big food service operations, colleges and universities are forced to throw food away because they never know exactly how many people will be dining in their cafeterias every day. Many schools are serving meals buffet-style and can’t run the risk of running out of food.

Simon says all the waste at the UMD began to resonate with him as a lost opportunity to feed the hungry — he was volunteering at soup kitchens and involved with food drives at the time. He discovered that only a handful of U.S. colleges had some sort of program to repurpose uneaten food. There was SPOON at Stanford University and the The Campus Kitchens Project, which had chapters in a few dozen schools.

“It just seemed like everywhere across the country, this surplus food from college campuses was just getting wasted,” he tells The Salt.

So he got to work, initially with a group of 11 people. Soon 200 people from other student organizations on campus came to volunteer. Three years later, the program expanded to more than 100 chapters around the country. To date, students in the network have salvaged nearly 640,000 pounds of food, which they repackage and driven by students in their own cars to local agencies that feed the hungry.

Colleges and universities have also been coming up with their own ways to prevent food waste, says Wynn Calder, a sustainability consultant and the director of the Association of University Leaders for a Sustainable Future. “A lot of schools have done things like introduce trayless dining,” he says. “A study at Loyola University Chicago found that a combination of getting rid of trays and reducing plate sizes makes about a 25 percent reduction in food waste.”

Other tactics include offering fewer food choices and putting unhealthful food further in the back to make students take less at a time.

Simon says part of his inspiration came from The Campus Kitchens Project, which was started in 2001 by the nonprofit D.C. Central Kitchen and now has 42 chapters. Whereas Simon’s organization rescues food that’s already been cooked, The Campus Kitchens Project has high-school and college students scavenging food from cafeterias, grocery stores and farmers’ markets, preparing it and delivering it to organizations serving low-income people in their communities.

“It’s the students who come up with the recipes, who check the temperature of the food, who are trained in [food] safety and who are running the shifts as a chef would,” says Jenny Bird, a coordinator for the The Campus Kitchens Project at the St. Louis University chapter.

At University of California, Davis, students are focusing on food waste that can’t be eaten but can be composted. Jessica Siegel, 21, is a senior who runs Project Compost. The student-led program collects nearly 2,000 pounds a week in carrot peels and coffee grounds from the school’s main coffee house and from a plant lab. It all gets composted into a material that’s donated to community gardens.

“You just see so much when you’re behind the scenes digging at the waste, like how much waste is produced and how much of that can be used to make compost,” says Siegel.

Wynn Calder at Association of University Leaders for a Sustainable Future says he’s thrilled that students are getting involved with the food waste issue.

“If you become aware of the importance of not wasting food at the age of 15, 18 or 20, it’s a heck of a lot better than figuring that out when you’re 50,” he tells The Salt.

If anyone is going to reverse the trend of food waste, it’s millennials, says Dana Gunders at the nonprofit National Resources Defense Council. “They care, they’re just starting to form their food habits and they’re opened to new things,” she says. “And they’re going to be eating food for longer than [older] generations.

What’s really needed, she says, is a “paradigm shift in how we value food. And I think millennials are really poised to drive that.”

]]>http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2015/02/27/when-food-is-too-good-to-waste-college-kids-pick-up-the-scraps/feed/1Student volunteers with The Campus Kitchens Project evaluate produce. The initiative gets high-school and college students to scavenge food from cafeterias, grocery stores and farmers’ markets, cook it and deliver it to organizations serving low-income people in their communities.Student volunteers with The Campus Kitchens Project evaluate produce. The initiative gets high-school and college students to scavenge food from cafeterias, grocery stores and farmers' markets, cook it and deliver it to organizations serving low-income people in their communities. Photo: Courtesy of DC Central KitchenFormer Director Nidhi Solanki of Project Compost uses a tractor and compost turner to turn food waste into compost.Former Director Nidhi Solanki of Project Compost uses a tractor and compost turner to turn food waste into compost. Photo: Sequoia WilliamsFarmers Fear Legal Status For Workers Would Lead Them Off The Farmhttp://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2015/02/26/farmers-fear-legal-status-for-workers-would-lead-them-off-the-farm/
http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2015/02/26/farmers-fear-legal-status-for-workers-would-lead-them-off-the-farm/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 19:12:23 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/?p=93569

The political battle over immigration, now provoking a confrontation between Congress and the White House, touches all of us in one very direct way: our food. That salad mix, and those apples, may well have been harvested by workers who arrived here in the U.S. illegally.

According to surveys, about half of all farm workers in the country lack legitimate documents, and live in what’s often described as a “shadow world,” without legal rights. The farmers who employ those workers, meanwhile, are deeply ambivalent about this situation.

“They present bona fide documents that show that they’re a legal worker. Do I believe that they’re 100 percent correct? No,” says Stephen Patricio, president of Westside Produce, a big melon packer in California’s Central Valley.

Patricio is frustrated with federal immigration policies that make life difficult for his workers. Those feelings are partly rooted in self-interest because he needs them. But they’re mixed with sympathy.

“They’re just trying to feed their families,” he says. “And to punish people for seeking a better life, which we’ve held up as our mantra throughout the world, is wrong!”

So one part of Patricio was happy when, last fall, President Obama promised more protection for millions of immigrants, such those who have children who are U.S. citizens. This executive action probably covers hundreds of thousands of farm workers — but it is now in limbo, because a federal judge in Texas has blocked it, at least for now.

Patricio, however, also has another reaction, one that illustrates deeper conflicts over U.S. immigration policy.

He says that giving more legal rights to those workers is probably bad for his business. He believes that some of these workers are in the Central Valley, working in agriculture, because it’s a good place to hide from the authorities.

If those workers gain legal status, “that pressure is off. Now they can go to the cities and look for construction jobs, or manufacturing jobs,” he says.

In the late 1980s, millions of immigrants gained legal status. Patricio believes that, as a result, many left agriculture.

But back then, employers had an alternative. The border was more porous than it is now, and employers were able turn to a fresh wave of immigrants. That flow has now slowed to a trickle, and Patricio says this has created a real shortage of farm workers.

Traveling around the Central Valley, I heard same argument from several different employers. Among the most vocal was Manuel Cunha, Jr., who is president of the Nisei Farmers League, based in Fresno.

Many workers who get legal protections “are going to go find full-time jobs, because now they’re safe,” Cunha said. “And I have nothing to replace them with. Nothing!”

At first, I was surprised to hear this argument. It seemed self-incriminating for employers to suggest that their workers are trapped in these jobs by their lack of legal status.

But there’s a political and historical background to Cunha’s argument. Cunha, along with many farm leaders, wants to resurrect some form of the guest worker program that they relied on in the 1950s and the 1960s. This program brought in large numbers of farm workers for seasonal work, but did not promise citizenship.

Groups representing farm employers have been lobbying Congress for a new guest worker program, so far without success.

Among them is Lorena Hernandez, who lives in Madera, Calif. She came to the U.S. from Mexico eight years ago. Since then, she married and now has a child.

Because of that daughter, who is an American citizen, Hernandez and her husband would be covered by the Obama Administration’s executive action; if it went into effect, she’d be able to work legally — at least for the next two years.

I met Hernandez before the recent court decision that put this on hold. So it looked at that time as though she would soon be able to get a real social security card. It would change a lot of things for her, she said, but not her job.

“I’m still going to be working in the fields,” she told me. “I like it.”

Her friends and co-workers feel the same way, she says. “I was talking to them about it, and it seems like they’re not interested in any other work. They’re just interested in working in the fields.”

Rick Mines, who ran a national survey of farm workers for the Department of Labor during the 1980s and 90s, says those surveys also show that workers who gain legal status are no more likely to leave farm work.

Many workers do leave agriculture, says, and many employers believe that legalization is the reason. But in reality, Mines says, “those farm workers leave because they can’t make a living at it. And whether or not they’re legal is not that relevant.”

Mines also is not a fan of a new guest worker program. Such programs have been criticized for abusing workers in the past. And according to Mines, many of the workers end up violating the rules and staying in the country.

Mines says that farmers simply will need to adapt to the closed border and compete for the workers who are here. This could mean paying workers more, or adapting farm operations so that workers have jobs year-round. The shortage of workers, in fact, has been one factor behind California’s shift to almond growing, which is much more mechanized and requires less labor.

Vegetable farmer Tom Willey, meanwhile, tries to attract and keep workers by offering them better working conditions. He and his wife Denesse are among the pioneers of organic farming in California.

They grow a huge variety of vegetables, in part so that they can offer year-round work and develop a more stable, cohesive team. “Creating that sense of community, in which people feel that they’re working in a non-coercive environment, is something that I focus a great deal on,” says Willey.

But Willey doesn’t pretend that he’s solved all the problems. He still can’t pay very much. As it is, 70 percent of his farm’s revenue goes to paying the workers. And they’re competing with other farms, not just in California, but also in Mexico and Central America, where workers earn even less.

We may be allowing fewer people to cross the border, Willey points out, but imports of vegetables from Mexico are way up.

If you really love vegetables and want to tell the world, there are many ways to do so. You can join a community supported agriculture group, or CSA. You can plant a garden in your front yard. And you can broadcast your passion with t-shirt or sticker slogan like “Eat More Kale” or “Powered By Plants.”

Now, there’s also the option of adorning your body with vegetable body art.

Jenna Weiler, a farmer and food entrepreneur from Michigan, has a Kickstarter underway to raise money for Tater Tats, a temporary vegetable tattoo business.

Weiler says the idea for the tats came to her when she was working on Groundswell Farm in west Michigan, and was joking with her fellow farmers that she should get a bean tattoo on her arm to remind her of the right size to harvest the legumes.

The temporary tattoos from Tater Tats come in three different seasonal packs. Image: Courtesy of Jenna Weiler

Rather then get a real bean tattoo, she decided that temporary vegetable tattoos could be a fun way to educate kids (and adults) about healthy, seasonal eating. Temporary body art could remind people of how beautiful vegetables are, and grouping them seasonally could help communicate what crops grow when, she says.

“Ideally these tats would be a fun way to make vegetables cool,” Weiler tells us by email. “So us food lovers can proclaim, ‘I’m proud to love eggplant!’ ”

The Tater Tats last three days and will cost $5 for a pack of four. They come in spring, summer and fall themes, featuring a few vegetables harvested in each season, like greens and radishes for spring, peppers and eggplant for summer and butternut squash and leeks for fall.

While temporary tattoos may be all some veggie lovers need, some diehards are committing to a lifetime of produce art on their bodies.

Kyle Crowell is a tattoo artist in Anaheim, Calif., who says he’s drawn a few vegetables in his day, including carrots, beets and two halves of an avocado on a married couple. (One of them got the pit.) Most of the people who request them are vegetarian or vegan, he says.

“Pizza is the no. 1 food-related tattoo, for whatever reason,” Crowell tells us. “But I appreciate the vegetables; they make for an interesting looking tattoo and they’re fun to draw.”

We combed Instagram for pictures of some of the best permanent vegetable tattoos, and assembled them here. We also recommend Edible Tattoos, a Tumblr dedicated to the art of food tattoos.

Tea is a daily ritual for millions of Britons. And the British are very specific about how they take their cuppa: black, traditionally with milk and sugar. In 1946,George Orwell wrote an essay in which he claimed to have cracked the code to putting together the perfect cup of tea with milk. But taste preferences can be very individual, so his solution may not be your ideal brew.

“Tea is not like something you can reliably make without really paying attention to detail,” says Mark Miodownik, a materials engineer at University College London.

Indeed, the ritual is so ingrained in British culture that several scientists over in the U.K. (and elsewhere) have devoted some time to breaking down tea science — specifically, what’s involved in brewing the perfect cuppa, British-style.

“If you like tea a certain way, then you need to work out what the variables are,” says Miodownik.

And there are many variables. Tea is made of many compounds, says chemist Nikolai Kuhnert at Jacobs University Bremen, in Germany, who has studied tea. In fact, black tea contains over 30,000 “rather complex molecules.”

To help you out, The Salt has put together a list of important variables and their chemis-tea, if you will, to aid you in pouring your perfect cuppa every time. (Though we do note, the world of tea is vast, and the Chinese tradition is quite different. This guide focuses on the English style of tea-drinking.)

Choose Your Tea

Are you in the mood for something lighter or more bold? Green tea and black tea are made from the same plant leaves, but black tea is withered and oxidated, and this processing renders it chemically different from green tea. For one thing, black tea has way more caffeine than green tea, making it a great morning wake-up call. (So explains Sir Martyn Poliakoff, a chemist at the University of Nottingham, in this entertaining video on tea chemistry.)

Choose your tea. Photo: Meredith Rizzo/NPR

Then, choose whether you want loose leaf or bagged tea. If it’s bagged, make sure it’s big. According to research by physical chemist Deo Jaganyi at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in South Africa, the shape of the bag doesn’t matter, but larger bags will allow more flavor from the tea to infuse the water.

In particular, he says, those pyramid-shaped bags aren’t any better than your average rectangle. “The shape of the pyramidal tea bag alone cannot increase the rate of infusion,” he and his coauthor wrote in a 2001 study in the journal Food Chemistry.

Loose leaf tea, when it sits directly in the water without a bag, is the best choice for allowing full infusion. “The volume of the pot in proportion to the tea and the water is different than [in] the cup,” says Miodownik.

Choose Your Cup

“If it’s a very thick cup, a ceramic cup, you’re going to cool down the tea very fast,” says Miodownik.

Animation: Meredith Rizzo/NPR

When tea first made its way from China to England, it was accompanied by very fine porcelain, which didn’t bleed the heat away so quickly, he says. A thick mug might feel nice in your hands, but the thinner the cup, the longer the tea will stay hot.

Brew Away

You should know the character of your favorite tea to determine how long to brew. Black tea is designed to be steeped at a very high temperature (near boiling, see below for more information) for three to five minutes, while green tea pairs with slightly cooler water for a minute or two.

Animation: Meredith Rizzo/NPR

Brewing for too long will release the tea’s tannins, a substance also found in wine, chocolate and berries that is bitter and astringent. However, too short a brew won’t allow the caffeine and flavors to fully infuse the water.

When you steep tea, “the caffeine comes out first” from the leaves, says chemist Kuhnert. If you keep infusing, compounds calledthearubigins seep out of the plant, and some will actually bind to the caffeine, he says — meaning the caffeine can’t then bind to your brain receptors and wake you up. The longer you infuse the tea, the less caffeine that’s available to your body, so a shorter brew can also be more invigorating, says Kuhnert.

But Watch The Temperature

According to the Tea Association of the U.S.A., the larger and more delicate the leaf, the cooler your water should be. Keeping the water close to boiling is ideal for black tea (between 200 and 212 degrees Fahrenheit). For green tea, the temperature can drop to 150 to 180 degrees Fahrenheit.

Taking the temperature of water for tea. Photo: Meredith Rizzo/NPR

You might even be able to tell the temperature of the water just by listening to how it pours. Humans are surprisingly good at this: Marketers at the company Condiment Junkie tested people to see whether they could tell the difference between the pour of a hot drink and a cold one. Amazingly, 96 percent of people could correctly discern the difference.

Add Milk (Or Don’t)

Adding milk to tea can lessen the effect of tannins. Milk’s many proteins fold themselves around the tannins, sequestering them and destroying the bitter taste.

But there’s a well-documented debate about the benefits of adding milk to the cup before or after the tea has been poured. Andrew Stapey, a chemical engineer at Loughborough University in Leicestershire, England, argues that milk should always be added beforehand. That way, the milk heats evenly. He says pouring in the milk after the tea causes the proteins in the milk to unfold unevenly, contributing to the skin you get on the top of the brew.

However, Miodownik says he’s tried to replicate this effect, but no informal taste tester has ever been able to perceive a difference.

Enjoy

So while the barista at your local shop may roll her eyes at the fussiness of your tea order, a perfect sip comes from careful chemistry. Just don’t be surprised if you end up having to make it yourself.

Crew members pull an oyster dredge in Tangier Sound of the Chesapeake Bay near Deal Island, Md., in 2013. A study found that the Chesapeake Bay shellfishery is a “hot zone” for ocean acidification. Photo: Patrick Semansky/AP

Ocean water in parts of the world is changing. Its chemistry is very slowly becoming more acidic, like lemon juice, and less alkaline, a la baking soda.

The change so far is small — you wouldn’t notice if you swam in the ocean or even drank it (not recommended, in any case). But numerous scientific studies show that it could get worse. One reason is that as humans produce more carbon dioxide, a lot is absorbed into the oceans. That makes the water more acidic.

Eastern oysters in South Kingston, RI on July 25, 2013. Photo: Rick Friedman/Nature

So, shellfish. Why is this bad news for them, and the $1 billion industry devoted to them in the U.S.?

Well, anything that builds a shell depends on calcium compounds in water. If water gets too acidic, it interferes with the chemistry of shell-building. So oysters, mussels, scallops and lots more will suffer in an increasingly acidic ocean. Crabs and lobsters and coral reefs will feel it as well, but mollusks are most vulnerable.

According to research published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, you can already measure the harmful effects on shellfish in places like the Pacific Northwest.

The study is billed as the first analysis of how shellfisheries in 15 states in the U.S. are likely to fare as this acidification continues. With 17 authors from 13 academic, government and environmental institutions, it examines not just ocean chemistry but local coastal pollution and how that combines with acidification.

And the news for the mollusk industry, as we said, is bad, though not without hope.

NOAA Map: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Some of the coastal areas could see damage from acidification within a few years. Southern Maine and southern Massachusetts are hot spots, as are estuaries along the East Coast, like the Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound. The latter are suffering from a lot of nitrogen pollution already from agricultural and sewage runoff. That pollution exacerbates the effects of acidification.

The study also points to the Gulf of Mexico as particularly vulnerable, in part because so few species of shellfish are harvested there. The more diverse the species, the study authors argue, the better chance a few will be resistant to the Gulf’s changing chemistry.

The study also points to coastal communities in New Jersey, Virginia and Louisiana that have relatively less monitoring of ocean acidity under way.

The hopeful note in the research is that there are solutions short of stopping the emission of carbon dioxide into the air. Reducing local nitrogen pollution in rivers and bays along the coasts is one. Raising shellfish where the ocean is less affected is another. There may also be strains of oysters that are resistant to acidity.

“There is plenty we can do to help these at-risk communities while protecting the environment,” Lisa Suatoni, an ecologist at the Natural Resources Defense Council and one of the authors, said in a statement.
Copyright 2015 NPR.

]]>http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2015/02/24/acidifying-waters-are-endangering-your-oysters-and-mussels/feed/0Crew members pull an oyster dredge in Tangier Sound of the Chesapeake Bay near Deal Island, Md., in 2013. A study found that the Chesapeake Bay shellfishery is a “hot zone” for ocean acidification.Crew members pull an oyster dredge in Tangier Sound of the Chesapeake Bay near Deal Island, Md., in 2013. A study found that the Chesapeake Bay shellfishery is a "hot zone" for ocean acidification. Photo: Patrick Semansky/APEastern oysters in South Kingston, RI on July 25, 2013.Eastern oysters in South Kingston, RI on July 25, 2013. Photo: Rick Friedman/Naturenoaa-monitoringmapNOAA Map: National Oceanic and Atmospheric AdministrationFeeding Babies Foods With Peanuts Appears To Prevent Allergieshttp://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2015/02/23/feeding-babies-foods-with-peanuts-appears-to-prevent-allergies/
http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2015/02/23/feeding-babies-foods-with-peanuts-appears-to-prevent-allergies/#commentsMon, 23 Feb 2015 23:26:24 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/?p=93464

In a landmark new study, researchers found that babies who consumed the equivalent of about four heaping teaspoons of peanut butter each week, starting when they were between 4 and 11 months old, were about 80 percent less likely to develop a peanut allergy by their fifth birthday. Photo: Anna/Flickr

Babies at high risk for becoming allergic to peanuts are much less likely to develop the allergy if they are regularly fed foods containing the legumes starting in their first year of life.

That’s according to a big new study released Monday involving hundreds of British babies. The researchers found that those who consumed the equivalent of about four heaping teaspoons of peanut butter each week, starting when they were between 4 and 11 months old, were about 80 percent less likely to develop a peanut allergy by their fifth birthday.

As many as 2 million U.S. children are estimated to be allergic to peanuts — an allergy that has been increasing rapidly in the United States, Britain and other countries in recent years. While most children who are allergic to peanuts only experience relatively mild symptoms, such as hives, some have life-threatening reactions that can include trouble breathing and heart problems.

“Peanut allergy can be extremely serious,” Lack says.

Lack’s study was launched after he noticed that Israeli kids are much less likely to have peanut allergies than are Jewish kids in Britain and the United States.

“My Israeli colleagues and friends and young parents were telling me, ‘Look, we give peanuts to these children very early. Not whole peanuts, but peanut snacks,’ ” Lack says.

Peanut snacks called Bamba, which are made of peanut butter and corn, are wildly popular in Israel, where parents give them to their kids when they’re very young. That’s very different from what parents do in Britain and the United States, where fears about food allergies have prompted many parents to keep their children away from peanuts, even though the American Academy of Pediatrics revised a recommendation to do so in 2008.

“That raised the question whether early exposure would prevent these allergies” by training babies’ immune systems not to overreact to peanuts, Lack says. “It’s really a very fundamental change in the way we’re approaching these children.”

To try to find out, Lack and his colleagues got funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to launch a study. They found 640 babies who were at high risk for developing peanut allergies because they already had eczema or egg allergy. They asked half of the infants’ parents to start feeding them Bamba, peanut butter, peanut soup or peanut in some other form before their first birthday and followed them for about five years.

“What we found was a very great reduction in the rate of peanut allergy,” Lack says. About 17 percent of the kids who avoided peanuts developed peanut allergies, compared to only 3.2 percent of the kids who ate peanuts, the researchers reported.

Based on the findings, Lack thinks most parents should start feeding their babies peanuts in one form or another as early as possible.

“We’ve moved, really, 180 degrees from complete avoidance to we should give peanuts to young children actively,” Lack says.

Other allergy experts hailed the results as an important advance.

“This is a major study — really what we would call a landmark study,” says Scott Sicherer, who advises the American Academy of Pediatrics on allergies. “There’s been a huge question about why there’s an increase in peanut allergy and what we can do to try to stem that increase. And this is a study that directly addresses that issue.”

But Sicherer says we have to be careful, since some kids are really sensitive to peanuts.

“If you’re a parent sitting at home with your child looking at them saying, ‘Well, gee, they didn’t eat peanut yet. Maybe I should run to the cupboard and get some peanut butter for them.’ It could be a little bit dangerous because if you do that and the child has a bad allergic reaction, you would be at home and have a problem,” Sicherer says.

So Sicherer says parents who have some reason to think their kids might be allergic to peanuts should get them tested first and then only try feeding them peanuts with a doctor in the room.

But other specialists say for most parents, the new findings should encourage them to start feeding their kids peanuts as early as possible.

“This is a question we get asked constantly in our clinic. When parents come in, they often have young children. They want to know what should they do. This really provides us with the answer,” says Hugh Sampson, who heads the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at Mount Sinai in New York. Sampson co-authored an editorial being published with the study.

“So now I think we’re on firm ground, and we can go forward and look the parents in the eye and say, ‘This is something that will be beneficial,'” Sampson says

A key question is whether kids will have to keep eating peanuts to keep any allergy at bay. Lack is following the kids in his study to find out what happened to them after they stopped eating peanuts regularly.

]]>http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2015/02/23/feeding-babies-foods-with-peanuts-appears-to-prevent-allergies/feed/0peanut-butterIn a landmark new study, researchers found that babies who consumed the equivalent of about four heaping teaspoons of peanut butter each week, starting when they were between 4 and 11 months old, were about 80 percent less likely to develop a peanut allergy by their fifth birthday. Photo: Anna/FlickrFreight Farms: Entrepreneurs Modify Shipping Containers to Grow Local Produce Year-Roundhttp://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2015/02/23/freight-farms-entrepreneurs-modify-shipping-containers-to-grow-local-produce-year-round/
http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2015/02/23/freight-farms-entrepreneurs-modify-shipping-containers-to-grow-local-produce-year-round/#commentsMon, 23 Feb 2015 21:49:33 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/?p=93452

The United States imports more than $100 billion of food every year from farms across the globe, often in the big metal shipping containers you see on cargo ships. Now, entrepreneurs are using those shipping containers to grow local produce.

“Freight Farms” are shipping containers modified to grow stacks of hydroponic plants and vegetables. It’s a new way for small-scale farmers to grow crops year-round in a computer-controlled environment, even in the middle of the city.

Freight Farms co-founders Jon Friedman and Brad McNamara started their Boston-based company in 2010. At first, they tell Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson, they were looking at growing food using urban rooftops.

Then they “realized that there was a much larger opportunity to empower more people in different spaces than just your unused roof space,” McNamara tells Hobson. Friedman and McNamara say their goal was to cut down on the number of miles it takes to get greens from farm to table, so you can grow local food anywhere.

The shipping containers are insulated, and all the systems – from pumps to irrigation to LED growing lights – can be digitally controlled. The Freight Farms are also Wi-Fi hot spots, so farmers can check on things like pH levels remotely using a mobile dashboard.

“They can set alerts. They can set alarms,” McNamara says, adding, “So if you’re at home and it’s really cold outside, your farm is covered in snow, you don’t actually have to leave your house to go check on things.”

Freight Farms says it has sold about 25 of the containers so far, at a cost starting at $76,000 each.

Shawn and Connie Cooney are two urban farmers putting the technology into action in Boston.

“In a city, you can grow enough produce using this technology to make a scalable business. So you can sell wholesale as well as retail and have a real business,” Shawn Cooney tells Hobson.

The couple is currently growing greens including kale, cilantro, mustard greens and wild mint. Like a library of plants, the herbs and vegetables are neatly organized in towers of leafy greens. The Cooneys sell most of their produce to restaurants via wholesale distributors.

“No we’re at the point where we’re asking what the restaurants want,” Connie Cooney says. Mustard greens, with their wasabi-like finish, are a popular request.

With a 365-day growing season, the Cooneys are always in business. Their four freight containers can yield as much produce as four acres of land – in less time, they say, than it would take to grow on a traditional farm.

“If you give them the right nutrients, they taste as good, or better, as they would coming out of a dirt farm,” Shawn Cooney says.

Even though watering, lighting and the addition of nutrients are all automatically controlled, “there’s still a lot of farm work going on,” Shawn Cooney says, adding, “You still have to come in and take care of the plants.”

At this point, the Cooneys’ business is breaking even. Now that they have a handle on the farming aspects, they can tailor their produce to what people want and focus on profit.

And while the Freight Farms system may seem particularly useful right now to Bostonians, with their city entombed in snow, Friedman hopes to see farmers all over the world adopt his company’s growing system.

“We see a lot of potential in a lot of other countries besides the U.S. [that] don’t have access to food, [that] either have a large urban sprawl or just don’t have the distribution system that we have in the U.S,” Friedman says.

This story comes to us via Here & Now, a show produced by NPR and member station WBUR in Boston. You can also listen to the audio version of this story on WBUR’s website.

The humorist Bill Bryson once wrote that “the purpose of the modern American suburb is to make sure that no citizen is ever more than 500 yards from a food product featuring melted cheese.”

That’s an exaggeration, but health officials have long worried that our environment of plentiful, cheap and easily accessible calories is contributing to obesity.

A group of economists argues in a new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research that the prevalence of restaurants and big-box grocers and warehouse clubs contributes mightily to weight gain. “Food’s gotten cheaper and more readily available, so we eat more of it. It’s really simple,” says study coauthor Charles Courtemanche, a health economist at Georgia State University. “At least a sizable portion of the rise in obesity can be characterized as responses to economic incentives.”

A major report from a group of government-appointed nutrition experts released Thursday noted that about two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese and nearly half suffer from chronic conditions related to poor diet and exercise. Many studies have shown that additional caloric intake rather than reduced exercise is driving the trend.

A big part of the problem of overeating, Courtemanche and his colleagues argue, is that restaurants and big-box stores are such effective delivery devices for loads of fattening foods.

“With 20 years of data, you can really identify the exact moment when a new Wal-Mart or new restaurants came in and you saw the rise in BMI,” Courtemanche says.

The study, coauthored by researchers at the universities of Iowa, Virginia and Louisville, looks at the nation as a whole, rather than focusing in on specific locales (although Courtemanche says there are clear regional differences). The authors compared information they had compiled about restaurant and big-box-store locations with survey data looking at individual health, as well as state-level data examining more than two dozen economic and demographic factors.

What they found was that the density of restaurants and large-scale food retailers in particular areas was a major factor between 1990 and 2010in the nationwide rise of obesity and BMI, or body mass index, which measures weight against an individual’s height. They attribute nearly half the rise in severe obesity — referring to people who are more than 50 percent above their ideal weight — to such businesses.

Courtemanche concedes that it would be impossible to prove to a certainty that big-box stores and restaurants cause increases in obesity, “unless you’re able to randomize which counties get a Wal-Mart and which ones don’t.” But he says even after controlling for other factors, such businesses have a measurable effect.

But others focused on the obesity problem are skeptical. Health officials have long debated how much our evolving environment, such as a lack of sidewalks and the prevalence of fast-food restaurants, has contributed to the obesity epidemic. And there’s a potential “chicken and egg” problem with the big-box analysis, says Ted Kyle, advocacy adviser to the Obesity Society, a Maryland-based group that promotes obesity research.

“What they did find is an association between areas with high numbers of big-box stores and people with high rates of obesity,” Kyle says. “It could be that the consumers who have high rates of obesity make very good customers for big-box stores.”

Kyle emphasizes that he doesn’t mean retailers go looking for areas with large numbers of obese residents, but that they do naturally seek customers who will purchase large quantities of packaged goods.

So, do the big-box stores cause obesity, or simply serve people with a propensity to buy in big amounts?

“They’re not going to put big-box stores in a place where there aren’t people who are going to shop there,” says Marlene Schwartz, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut. (The center was formerly at Yale University.)

Still, Schwartz notes that the study is careful to filter for other possible explanations, such as income levels and population density and age. Big-box stores and restaurants, she says, are part of the perils of abundance in the American diet.

Our brains respond greedily to a surfeit of food, she suggests. “Historically, food didn’t last forever,” Schwartz says. “You had to eat food when you had it [so] the idea of eating more when you have so much available makes sense to me.”

Wal-Mart and other retailers say the study does not take into account their efforts to offer more healthful choices and reduce the number of calories consumers take home with them. They also cite their involvement with first lady Michelle Obama on her “Let’s Move” initiative and the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation.

Still, they haven’t stopped selling foodstuffs in mass quantities. Yet the problem may not be that food retailers are seemingly everywhere, selling chocolate pretzels in 3.5-gallon containers, but how people react to such goodies, suggests Brian Wansink, a former federal nutrition official who is a professor of consumer behavior at Cornell University.

When people “stockpile” bulk foods, they’re likely to eat a lot of it in a short time, he says. Like, half of it within a few days.

A couple of simple steps can drastically reduce such overconsumption, Wansink says. Put that 36-bag package of chips in a cupboard that’s just a little bit out of the way, such as in a pantry in the basement. Also, breaking up the packages — by dividing chips, for instance, into smaller bags — helps people to slow their eating down appreciably.

“If we broke the food into smaller units, like 150 or 200 calories, it reduced how much people ate to about 10 percent more than they typically would, instead of it being a whole lot more,” says Wansink, who recently published a book, Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life. “Repackaging that huge, money-saving item into smaller subitems and putting them into a cupboard that’s out of sight are very simple steps and don’t involve willpower or keeping a food diary.”

The conclusion is thus the same as always with dietary information. Chips, cookies and melted cheese are all around us. It’s OK to buy all you want, Wansink suggests, and enjoy. Just don’t overdo it at any given time.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cautions that unpasteurized milk can cause serious illness, because it’s a fertile breeding ground for harmful germs like salmonella and E. coli. But such warnings haven’t deterred raw milk enthusiasts. Photo: Abby Wendle/Harvest Public Media

The federal government banned the sale of raw milk across state lines nearly three decades ago because it poses a threat to public health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association all strongly advise people not to drink it.

But individual states still control raw milk sales within their borders. And despite the health warnings, some Midwestern states have recently proposed legalizing raw milk sales in order to impose strict regulations on the risky — and growing — market.

Raw milk has become popular in recent years as part of the local food movement: An estimated 3 percent of the population drinks at least one glass a week. Many of its fans are fiercely passionate about what they see as its benefits. They say they buy raw milk because it doesn’t contain the growth hormone rGBH, they like the taste, and they enjoy having a direct connection to the food they eat.

“I like having a relationship with the people who are producing the food I put in my body,” says Holly Stovall, a raw milk consumer and advocate from Macomb, Ill.

Joel Gruver is the milkman for a group of raw milk drinkers in Macomb, Ill. Photo: Abby Wendle/Harvest Public Media

But raw milk is particularly fertile for germs. By definition, raw milk is not pasteurized — the process of heating milk to 161 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 seconds to kill harmful bacteria like salmonella, E. coli and campylobacter. Milk contaminated with these bacteria does not look, smell or taste different from milk that’s safe to drink, but it can lead to severe illness.

Dr. Robert Tauxe, the deputy director of the foodborne, waterborne and environmental disease division at the CDC, says that children, the elderly and pregnant women are most at risk. And no one is immune.

“Healthy people of any age can get very sick, or even possibly die, if they drink contaminated raw milk,” he says.

But warnings from federal health regulators haven’t dissuaded those determined to drink it.

Bob Ehart, senior policy and science adviser at the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA), has been tracking raw milk policy in all 50 states for the past decade. He says more and more states are legalizing its sale.

According to NASDA’s most recent survey, conducted in 2011, raw milk sales are legal in 30 states, with a variety of restrictions on how it can be sold. Twelve, including California, Pennsylvania and Utah, allow raw milk sales in retail stores. In Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska, customers have to go to the farm to buy it. And in Colorado, consumers enter into a legal contract with the farmer in what’s called a cow-share — a CSA-style operation in which consumers buy a share of a cow in exchange for raw milk.

The CDC has been monitoring this move towards broader legalization and recently reported a corresponding increase in the number of illnesses attributed to raw milk: up four fold from years past. From 2007 to 2012, there were 81 outbreaks reported — an average of 13 per year that led to nearly 1,000 illnesses and 73 hospitalizations. That’s compared to just three outbreaks a year, on average, from 1993 to 2006.

The greatest jump was in outbreaks of severe diarrhea, often the result of drinking raw milk tainted with campylobacter-infected feces. Tauxe says that spike should serve as a reminder that no amount of regulation can make raw milk safe.

But NASDA’s Ehart suggests some states may not be legalizing raw milk sales to condone it. Rather, he says legalization may give public health agencies the power to regulate a market that might otherwise exist underground.

“Some would say that it would be worse if there’s nothing on the books that allows the agency to do anything,” Ehart says. “This at least allows them to do something if there’s an exposure level that affects public health.”

The battle over raw milk regulation is raging in Illinois. Despite being illegal, raw milk sales in the state have grown. Dozens of dairies now supply nearly a half-million customers.

Joe Zanger’s three Guernsey cows produce up to 30 gallons of raw milk a day. For the past few years, he’s been selling the unpasteurized stuff by the gallon, in glass jars, to a growing number of customers living in Quincy, Ill., the city down the road from his dairy.

Joe Zanger and his son, Abram, clean out the cow barn. For the past few years, Zanger has been selling raw milk by the gallon to a growing number of customers living in Quincy, Ill., the city down the road from his dairy. Photo: Abby Wendle/Harvest Public Media

Zanger says he earns a few hundred dollars a week from this side business — enough to pay for animal feed, vet bills and milking barn maintenance. He believes that one day, it could turn into a profitable venture.

“This is something that I can maybe grow a little bit, if I pick up more customers and buy more cows and just keep recycling that money” into the business, he says.

When Illinois became aware of the growing market, the health department proposed rules that would technically legalize raw milk, but impose strict regulations on the industry. Similar to other states in the region, sales would be limited to the farm.

Farmers would also be required to place a warning label on the product, sell it within five days of milking, and keep records of whom they sell to. By keeping track of where raw milk flows, public health officials say they’ll be able to more effectively respond to outbreaks, if they happen. But farmers complain it’s an unnecessary headache.

When it comes to the milking operation, the proposed rules mandate that all farmers keep their dairy cows “free from dirt” and routinely have their milk tested for harmful bacteria. Farmers would also have to upgrade their infrastructure to have an easily cleanable milking barn, proper plumbing, and a separate milk house to store the product in a refrigerated, stainless-steel tank.

The Illinois proposal is currently on indefinite hold. Legislation to open the market in both Iowa and Indiana was proposed in 2013, but stalled in committee.

The proposed regulations in Illinois have garnered fierce resistance from raw milk consumers and producers, who see them as an attack on small businesses and personal freedom.

“The free market has taken us so far already. Why not just keep letting it go?” asks dairyman Zanger. “If you come out to my farm and you see something you don’t like that makes you not want to buy my milk, you have every right to say, ‘No, thanks.’ If everything looks appropriate, why can’t you buy it?”

In the absence of legislation in Illinois, producers like Zanger are left wondering whether they’ll have to pay for expensive upgrades in the near future — or worse, be shut down by regulators.

For now, Zanger continues to sell raw milk and cream to his customers. Even though it’s illegal, the thirst is there, and Zanger says so is his commitment to quenching it.

Abby Wendle is a reporter for Tri States Public Radio. A version of this story appeared on the site of Harvest Public Media,a public radio reporting collaboration that focuses on agriculture and food production.

]]>http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2015/02/20/why-some-states-want-to-legalize-raw-milk-sales/feed/1The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cautions that unpasteurized milk can cause serious illness, because it’s a fertile breeding ground for harmful germs like salmonella and E. coli. But such warnings haven’t deterred raw milk enthusiasts.The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cautions that unpasteurized milk can cause serious illness, because it's a fertile breeding ground for harmful germs like salmonella and E. coli. But such warnings haven't deterred raw milk enthusiasts. Photo: Abby Wendle/Harvest Public MediaJoel Gruver is the milkman for a group of raw milk drinkers in Macomb, Ill.Joel Gruver is the milkman for a group of raw milk drinkers in Macomb, Ill. Photo: Abby Wendle/Harvest Public MediaJoe Zanger and his son, Abram, clean out the cow barn. For the past few years, Zanger has been selling raw milk by the gallon to a growing number of customers living in Quincy, Ill., the city down the road from his dairy.Joe Zanger and his son, Abram, clean out the cow barn. For the past few years, Zanger has been selling raw milk by the gallon to a growing number of customers living in Quincy, Ill., the city down the road from his dairy. Photo: Abby Wendle/Harvest Public Media